reds is a light-weight Redis search for node.js. This module was originally developed to provide search capabilities for Kue a priority job queue, however it is very much a light general purpose search library that could be integrated into a blog, a documentation server, etc.

The first thing you'll want to do is create a Search instance, which allows you to pass a key, used for namespacing within Redis so that you may have several searches in the same db.

var search = reds.createSearch('pets');

reds acts against arbitrary numeric or string based ids, so you could utilize this library with essentially anything you wish, even combining data stores. The following example just uses an array for our "database", containing some strings, which we add to reds by calling Search#index() padding the body of text and an id of some kind, in this case the index.

var strs =[];

strs.push('Tobi wants four dollars');

strs.push('Tobi only wants $4');

strs.push('Loki is really fat');

strs.push('Loki, Jane, and Tobi are ferrets');

strs.push('Manny is a cat');

strs.push('Luna is a cat');

strs.push('Mustachio is a cat');

strs.forEach(function(str,i){search.index(str, i);});

To perform a query against reds simply invoke Search#query() with a string, and pass a callback, which receives an array of ids when present, or an empty array otherwise.

search

.query(query ='Tobi dollars')

.end(function(err,ids){

if(err)throw err;

console.log('Search results for "%s":', query);

ids.forEach(function(id){

console.log(' - %s', strs[id]);

});

process.exit();

});

By default reds performs an intersection of the search words, the previous example would yield the following output:

Search results for "Tobi dollars":

- Tobi wants four dollars

We can tweak reds to perform a union by passing either "union" or "or" to reds.search() after the callback, indicating that any of the constants computed may be present for the id to match.

search

.query(query ='tobi dollars')

.end(function(err,ids){

if(err)throw err;

console.log('Search results for "%s":', query);

ids.forEach(function(id){

console.log(' - %s', strs[id]);

});

process.exit();

},'or');

The intersection would yield the following since only one string contains both "Tobi" and "dollars".

Currently reds strips stop words and applies the metaphone and porter stemmer algorithms to the remaining words before mapping the constants in Redis sets. For example the following text:

Tobi is a ferret and he only wants four dollars

Converts to the following constant map:

{

Tobi:'TB',

ferret:'FRT',

wants:'WNTS',

four:'FR',

dollars:'DLRS'

}

This also means that phonetically similar words will match, for example "stefen", "stephen", "steven" and "stefan" all resolve to the constant "STFN". Reds takes this further and applies the porter stemming algorithm to "stem" words, for example "counts", and "counting" become "count".

Consider we have the following bodies of text:

Tobi really wants four dollars
For some reason tobi is always wanting four dollars

The following search query will then match both of these bodies, and "wanting", and "wants" both reduce to "want".

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